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The most breakingest of breaking news, via the official Lucasarts twitter feed – which has been horribly teasing the poor, frustrated internet for the last few days about what, they promised, was a massively exciting announcement. A Day of the Tentacle remake? A new X-Wing/TIE Fighter game? Officially striking the Star Wars prequels from the record? The Loom 2: Loomier? Nah- they’ve only gone and lobbed a crapload of their classic back catalogue onto Steam. Rejiggered for XP and Vista compatibility too, no less.

What’s that strange noise? It’s thousands of 30-year-old men simultaneously having a Special Wee, that’s what.
This little lot is available from the 8th July:

Of course, there are immediately notable absences, such as the holy quadrilogy of Sam & Max Hit The Road, Day of The Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango, and the X-Wing/TIE Fighter series, but we’re promised “this is just the beginning. We know how much you guys love our old games.”

They’ve taken their sweet time about this, having steadfastedly ignored our changing times for years, and God only knows why. Judging by the current explosion of joy around the web, though, it’s most certainly not too little too late.

Having never, ever played the X-Wing/TIE-Fighter games, but having read about them jealously in various gaming magazines back when I only had an Acorn, I have extremely large fingers crossed that they’re on the way.

Never played the Indy adventures, either – I seem to recall general opinion being pretty high?

Good news on Fate of Atlantis. Last I heard about it was that it was bundled, Manic Mansion and Day of the Tentacle style, to the new Indie Wii game, and I honestly considered buying both Wii and (reportedly) lackluster game because I’ve lost my copy.
Simon Jones, The Last Crusade is pretty punishing (eg, to fly a plane midway through the game, you’d have to have checked out a book on pilotry in the library at the beginning) but Fate of Atlantis is a well-written, multi-pathed gem.

This is good. Personally I’m more interested in the ‘coming soon’ category because the Vista/Windows 7 compatible version of Grim Fandango would make my day. Certainly will be getting The Dig though, as its a game I always wanted to play. Also kind of hoping that these also turn up on GoG as well (because you get the extras), though I suspect the DRM free aspect will discount that from happening.

Knowing Lucasarts and their tendency to repackage and rerelease occasionally, expect every Star Wars PC game to be chucked up. I really hope they fix the probs with Vista / XP AND sort and update online support for XWing vs TIE Fighter. I remember the pre GFWL Microsoft gaming servers and they were all a bit shite.

I loved Tie Fighter back in the day, I had the expansion pack that let you fly Tie Defenders ect. I never really liked X-Wing VS Tie Fighter though, the ships seemed smaller and a lot harder to hit and death seemed to have a lot more often regardless what you did. It seemed like every ship had missle launchers which made it a lot harder and with no story line it was just boring even online.

Still my favourite game of all time. There were versions of X-Wing and TIE fighter in the XvT engine, but neither had the Imuse system, which played music which linked up to events. Still the best music system ever IMHO, it was just so seemless, despite the tininess of the midi.

Thinking about that list I have a theory. Those are the games that are sort of popular. Not the ones that don’t really deserve to be resurected like Rebel Assault and not the absolute classics like Full Throttle. My theory is they’re holding back the classics to see how well the Monkey Island special edition does and if it does well then they’ll give the same treatment to all the classics and if it doesn’t do well they’ll just shove them out as straight ports like these.

@Persus-9: Personally, I’d argue that Fate of Atlantis was an absolute classic like Full Throttle, and would probably be even more amenable to a “Special Edition” remake because of the marketability of the Indiana Jones franchise. Oh well.

Yay, after teasing all that time, made people imagine sequels to their beloved games, they announced, gloriously… That nothing new.
They are only releasing older games, and worst of all, doing that on Steam. Making a deal with GoG would have been too much ? You had to make crazily old games enter the DRM world ? Pff.

And how. If I see ‘remastered’ in the description, or the price rises about 10-15 dollars, watch your attempt fail.

Also, as a dev I know how I’d feel, but I wonder how it feels to the people who worked on games since these were put out that there’s more excitement for TIE Fighter than any Lucasarts game pretty much since then.

@ suibhne: Yeah I was thinking that as a typed it, Fate of Atlantis is an odd one out on that list. It ain’t a perfect theory that’s for sure but I still feel quite good about it, I think there’s some truth there.

There are also all the modern games that don’t need any touching up on that list but they don’t hurt my theory like Fate of Atlantis does.

at least I remember playing it as a kid and the difficulty was just right. It’s very linear and very simplistic and touches on a few children’s tales.

Anyway for a better adventure game experience I recommend Day of the Tentacle (which for some reason isn’t on the list?) and Indiana Jones Fate of Atlantis (lots of fun here and good voice acting from what I remember)